Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Six Years On: Why The Palin Birth Hoax Story Still Shouldn't Go Away

(Originally published in April 2011. Last updated in June 2014.)

Rumors, innuendo and inconclusive photographs do not a true story make, but the fact of the matter is that six-plus years after the birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin, there is no proof that Sarah Palin is his biological mother and evidence he may be her grandson.If you believe that I -- or anyone else -- has no business pursuing the question of whether John McCain's 2008 running mate put over an enormous hoax on the American public because the whole idea is so . . . well, yucky, then you need read no further. Besides which, a kid with disabilities having a home with a family that has plenty of dough is enough for many people who are averse to questioning Palin's serial evasions.But if you, like me, remain curious about the evasions concerning her alleged pregnancy and Trig's birth, as well as her unwillingness to provide any proof to tamp down rumors that she faked the birth of the Down syndrome child, then stick around. Palin still will not even release a copy of Trig's birth certificate although she hectored Barack Obama to release his.

This story deserves to have legs because the former half-term governor turned author and reality show princess and most recently Tea Party carnival sideshow freak not only has not gone away.

She continues to inject herself into national politics, having campaigned early on for the 2012 Republican president nomination until even she realized that her brand was tarnished despite a small but hard-core conservative constituency that continues to cling to her every statement as if they were Biblical missives.

These statements have included appallingly outrageous and tone deaf comments in the wake of the 2011 assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, whom she infers is brain damaged and should release her medical records. And come to think of it, what has Palin accomplished over the last decade beyond running her mouth?

The events leading up to and after Trig's alleged birth -- and, yes, it is alleged -- on April 18, 2008 are copiously documented in an academic paper and lengthy commentary by Bradford W. Scharlott, a former reporter and professor at Northern Kentucky University who believes there may have been a conspiracy hoax and like me is deeply disturbed about the disinterest of a mainstream media that at the same time was unable leave alone far-fetched Obama birther conspiracy theories.

* * * * *

In late February 2008, Palin's bodyguard, Alaska State Trooper Gary Wheeler, had accompanied her to Washington, D.C. for a Republican Governors Association conference where she met McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis, who was to be in charge of the vice-presidential nomination selection process. Palin had been mentioned as a potential vice presidential choice for the eventual nominee, albeit a long-shot candidate, for several months in conservative publications.

Wheeler recalls that when Palin changed into jeans upon her arrival in the capital, there was no apparent sign that she was pregnant.On March 5, 2008, McCain all but clinched the Republican nomination.

On March 6, the Anchorage Daily News reported that Palin had announced she was expecting her fifth child and already was seven months along. "That the pregnancy is so advanced astonished all who heard the news," wrote reporter Wesley Loy. "The governor . . . simply does not look pregnant. Even close members of her staff said they only learned this week their boss was expecting."

On April 15, Palin and her husband Todd flew to Dallas where she was to give the keynote speech at a Republican governor's conference on energy. Trooper Wheeler, a 26-year veteran who had provided security for several other Alaska governors, was told at the last minute that he was not needed. He says that no explanation was given, and the Palins rejected his offer to arrange for a security detail to meet them in Texas.

On April 17, the Palins cut out early from the governor's conference after Palin gave the keynote speech. Shortly after the speech, Todd Palin emailed friends, writing that her speech "kicked ass," but said nothing about the status of her pregnancy or hurriedly arranged return trip. Meanwhile, Palin herself also did not allude to being in labor in a flurry of emails, although she later stated publicly that she was "overwhelmed" with "desperation" about her condition.

In Going Rogue, a 2009 bestselling autobiography chockablock with lies and fabrications, Palin claimed she had been awakened shortly before 4 a.m. on the morning of the speech by a strange sensation in her lower belly. She wrote that she was leaking amniotic fluid and claimed she called her personal physician, Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who apparently did not insist that she seek immediate medical intention.

After laying over in Seattle, the Palins landed in Anchorage about 10:30 p.m. local time and drove to the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, which is close to the Palin's home in Wasilla. The trip took a total of 10 hours. Airline personnel on the return flight said they did not notice that Palin was pregnant, let alone was showing signs that she might be about to give birth.

He writes that the friend told him that "Palin did not look like she was pregnant. Ever. Even when she had the bulging belly, I never felt that the rest of her body, her face especially, looked like she was pregnant." When the woman asked Palin point-blank if she was certain the baby was hers, she says that Palin said, "No. I don't know what to believe."

According to a later story in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin gave birth at 6:30 a.m. on April 18 after Cathy Baldwin-Johnson induced labor.

This means that if Palin's water had broken prior to her giving the keynote speech, she chose to not go check herself into any of the five world-class Dallas hospitals with neo-natal intensive-care units or similarly equipped Seattle hospitals, and waited some 20 hours before going to a hospital that did not
have a neo-natal ICU after having passed several large Alaska hospitals with such units despite her history of miscarriages (two), to give birth to a one-month
premature baby with Down syndrome and, as it later turned out, a heart
condition.

Later that morning, a crew from KTUU-TV in Anchorage showed up at Mat-Su in pursuit of a tip that Palin had given birth. The crew taped Chuck and Sallie Health, Palin's parents, in a hallway holding an infant that Chuck Health said was their new grandchild, Trig. Sarah Palin did not appear. The source of the tip is believed to be KTUU reporter Bill McAllister, who became Palin's director of communications three months later.

It was obvious to a number of people who saw the baby that day that it was not a newborn preemie. Some of them wrote that at the Anchorage Daily News web site. The comments were quickly taken down, but the Palins realized that for the next month or two, they needed a younger stand-in for Trig for photo ops they would orchestrate.

The identity of the stand-in baby may never be known, but Scharlott has done a detailed analyses of screenshots of the baby showed off at Mat-Su and the baby that Palin later appeared with at the Republican National Convention. He concludes that they are not the same child because of differences in the ears and because the baby in the hospital lacked characteristics of a newborn preemie such as a plethoric (red-faced) complexion.

A press release issued by the governor's office announced the birth of the Palins' "fifth child this morning. The Palins were thankful that the Governor's labor began yesterday while she was in Texas . . . but let up enough for her to travel on Alaska Airlines in time to deliver her second son . . . " The press release did not say where the birth took place, Mat-Su did not list Trig among the babies born there that day, nor has any hospital official ever confirmed that Trig was born there, let alone when, or said anything publicly about the birth. (A writer for Slate reported in late April 2011 that a clerk in Mat-Su's family birthing center told him that Trig was born there. Birth certificates are not public records in Alaska.)

Baldwin-Johnson has never publicly said a word about the birth.Later that day, KTUU newscaster Lori Tipton reported that "An unnamed source that is close to the family said that early testing revealed Trig Palin has Down syndrome." The source is again believed to be McAllister.

Although preemies typically need to stay in neo-natal ICUs for days or weeks, on April 21, Palin returned to work and held a press conference with Trig at hand. When a reporter asked if her water had broken in Texas, she balked at the question but later indicated that it had.

In a surprise announcement on August 28, McCain announced that he had selected Palin as his running mate.

Considering that Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency if McCain defeated Obama, the decision to choose a virtual unknown whose popularity already had tanked in Alaska because of a reputation for being a power abusing kook and liar has to rank as perhaps the most irresponsible in the history of presidential campaigns. As it turned out, McCain's man in charge of vetting potential running mates never met Palin face to face, while the campaign had contacted only one person in Alaska -- her personal attorney. McCain himself spent less than two hours with Palin before inviting her to join the ticket.

Bloggers at Daily Kos and several other blogs quickly published posts claiming that Bristol Palin, the Palins' 17-year-old daughter, was Trig's mother, which would make Trig Palin's grandson. None of the posts had attribution, and several large blogs, including the Huffington Post, responded by writing that the Democrats would hurt themselves by pursuing birth conspiracy hoax rumors.

In a pattern of accepting unproven claims by Palin as established fact that was to become so familiar, the mainstream media showed no interest in the rumors, although the Anchorage Daily News reported on the Daily Kos post, saying it was "a version of a rumor -- long simmering in Alaska -- that Palin's unwed daughter Bristol was pregnant and the governor somehow covered it up by pretending to have the baby (Trig) herself."

On September 1, the McCain campaign announced at Palin's behest that Bristol Palin was in her fifth month of pregnancy, the implication being that she therefore could not be Trig's mother. The announcement was curious insofar that if accurate the pregnancy had been a private matter for months and Bristol, who had dropped out of school and been out of the public eye, was being subjected to having it revealed to the national media at the Republican convention.

Stories portraying Palin as a courageous woman for running for vice president despite Trig's problems appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and other leading newspapers. Only the Philadelphia Inquirer went off key in writing that "Palin's decision to chase the vice presidency even as she gave birth to a son with Down syndrome seems naive."

Although the McCain campaign never allowed Palin to appear at a press conference where she might be asked about Trig, she repeatedly promised that she would release her medical records as had Obama and Joe Biden. When McCain finally did so on November 3, the day before Election Day, there was a page-and-a-half long letter annexed to the records signed by Dr. Baldwin-Johnson stating that Palin followed proper pre-natal procedures and follow-up evaluations and nothing had precluded delivery of Trig "at her home community hospital."

The wording of the letter is awkward in the extreme, and it raises many questions while answering none.

Baldwin-Johnson avoids mentioning the hospital by name or even that she was the delivering physician, let alone present for the delivery. The timing of the letter insured that the news media would have no opportunity before America voted to ask follow-up questions, and Palin and Baldwin-Johnson later declined to answer questions because Palin was no longer a candidate, let alone vice president-elect and soon to be a proverbial "heartbeat away from the presidency.

The September 1 McCain campaign press release regarding Bristol's pregnancy becomes even more problematic given the circumstances surrounding the birth of baby Tripp to Bristol Palin.

People magazine quoted a great-aunt in Seattle as saying she got an email from Chuck Health, Sarah Palin's father, saying that Tripp was born on December 28, which would put the date of conception at late March 2008 or thereabouts. That quote is the only contemporaneous account of the birth of the child. Palmer, Alaska, was mentioned as the place of birth, but again no hospital was named and again Mat-Su Regional Medical Center had no comment.

Palin's office initially declined to comment on the birth, explaining that it wanted the event to remain as private as possible although Palin and the McCain campaign had made a big deal of Bristol's pregnancy four months earlier. No photographs of baby Tripp were published, and no one outside the immediate family saw him until seven weeks after the birth.

When Bill McAllister, who had become Palin's director of communications, did issue a press release, he said that it was to correct erroneous information. The press release did not mention the hospital or place of birth.

Following the election, the Anchorage Daily News assigned reporter Lisa Demer to try to get to the bottom of the conspiracy hoax rumors, which had not gone away and continued to be pursued by a few journalists, notably blogger Andrew Sullivan, who again weighed in on the possibility of a hoax after Palin's barbs about Hillary Clinton's health.

Demer too was unable to obtain proof that Sarah Palin was Trig's mother, although she did get an angry response from Palin after Demer's editor published an account of her efforts on his blog on January 12, 2009.

* * * * *

I will preface my own take on this long-running story by noting that I was an investigative editor and reporter for many years. Series and stories that I supervised were nominated for four Pulitzer Prizes.

While that background does not make me omnipotent, I trust my instincts when wading through and weighing facts -- or in this case the absence of them -- which has taken me on a journey from being highly skeptical of there being a birth conspiracy hoax to the conclusion that there almost certainly was.Weighing against the hoax is that large-scale conspiracies are virtually impossible to keep quiet, something noted by Palin hoax skeptics. This is why 9/11 terror attack conspiracy theorists will be treading water forever.

But this is not a large-scale conspiracy because beyond Palin's immediate family only the officials of a hospital, on whose board Palin served, and Baldwin-Johnson would have to remain silent, something made easier by the possibility that Trig was not born at Mat-Su, but had been born earlier, smuggled in by a family member, and the hospital was not directly involved and Baldwin-Johnson was not present. Note further that Palin's four previous successful pregnancies had gone to full term, and that Palin herself has changed and embellished on key elements of her original birth story in the years since, including once claiming that she delivered Trig in an Anchorage hospital.

Weighing for the hoax is an Alaska-sized array of circumstantial evidence: That attendants on the April 17 flight from Texas to Anchorage, along with Palin's own staff, Trooper Wheeler and almost everyone else with whom she came in contact in the weeks and days before the alleged birth, did not believe that she was pregnant. This perhaps not coincidentally was a period during which no one can account for daughter Bristol's whereabouts.

In fact, it may not be merely a conspiracy but also the product of a dysfunctional family, something that the Palins sadly are.

Bristol was sent to live with an aunt in late 2007, halfway through her junior year, ostensibly to be home schooled. She may have had Trig under the care of Baldwin-Johnson, who is the founder of The Children's Place, which specializes in helping teenagers in trouble, but was unable to place Trig for adoption because he was a Down baby. (Bristol claimed in Not Afraid of Life, a memoir published in June 2011, that she was impregnated by Levi Johnston while drunk on wine coolers on a camping trip.)Evidence based on photographs of Palin in the weeks and days before the alleged birth is not only inconclusive, it is contradictory because a seven-month pregnant woman simply cannot hide a fetus.

Yet Palin looks flat tummied in some of the photos such as the ones above taken on February 13 -- some eight weeks before Trig's alleged birth -- and pregnant although not pregnant in the right way in others. This leads Scharlott to suggest that Palin might have been wearing padding on some occasions, something that doesn't seem far-fetched.

Had Palin, who is an extremely proud woman, been in the latter stages of a pregnancy, she presumably would have worn clothing that would not try to hide that. Instead, she took to wearing long scarves that covered her belly. Furthermore, a late February interview with her by a reporter with a film crew from an Alaska broadcast outlet shows a woman who does not appear to be pregnant who is walking on snow in high heels while holding a cup of coffee in one hand.

Then there is the screen shot below which purports to show Trig, who is being held by Palin's mother, less than 24 hours after his birth. Does he look like a one-month premature baby less than 24 hours after his birth? Of course he doesn't, which is the view of a neonatologist.

One question remains: If there was a hoax, why did Sarah Palin perpetrate it?

Dr. Jeffrey Parks, a Cleveland surgeon, later wrote of the journey that Palin took after she says her water broke:

"Digest that for just a second. A 43 year old wowman carrying a child with known Down's Syndrome, in her eighth month of pregnancy voluntarily embarked upon a transcontinental adventure to give a speech. Then after noticing some cramps and the passage of amniotic fluid, she went head with her speech and, instead of proceeding directly to the nearest Dallas high risk pregnancy center, boarded a four hour flight to Seattle. Then she hung out in the Seattle airport lounge for a while and took a connecting flight to Alaska. Then she drives to Wasilla. Finally she decided to seek medical attention at a local Wasilla hospital, a facility lacking an NICU and other high risk specialists. That's her story . . . Palin willfully and wantonly placed herself and her unborn child in tremendous danger by flying cross country with amniotic fluid running down her legs . . . What kind of mother would take a risk like that with her child, let alone a high risk, premature one?"

While Palin used Trig as a stage prop during her vice presidential run and has used him similarly since then, she also has been fiercely protective of he and her family. Palin's post-vice presidential nomination popularity went through the roof in part because of the omnipresent Trig, and claiming that she was the mother of Bristol's baby may have been less an act of political opportunism than reckless personal expediency, if not altruism.

To use late journalist Joe McGinniss's term, I suppose I am "trignostic," meaning that I am skeptical about Palin's story. But I am not absolutely certain that it is not true in the absence of a proverbial "smoking gun," although an observation shared by many people who have known Palin since high school -- and know that she is a pathological liar of stunning dimensions -- weighs heavily in favor of a hoax: Even if Palin had not faked the story, she was more than capable of doing so.

So I do lean very strongly toward there having been a hoax.

In the end, it comes down to this for me: Sarah Palin is so narcissistic she believes that if something comes out of her mouth, it must be true. But if she was the mother of Trig, she would not have acted imprudently by bypassing hospitals in Texas, Seattle and Anchorage with neo-natal units capable of delivering premature babies. She simply would not have endangered Trig's life.

Good point. My supposition is that either Trig or Tripp was not born to a Palin, which pretty much takes care of the math problem. There is another active rumor in Alaska to the effect that Todd Palin had an affair and fathered a child. Might that child be either Trig or Tripp?

While concocting a birth hoax is rather more dramatic than endlessly polishing your narcissism, you are making a provocative connection here. (Or, as the case may be, I am making it for you.)

Palin's "blood libel" outburst after the Tuscon rampage was entirely unnecessary and caused her grievous political harm among an already shrunken core of supporters, but she obviously felt aggrieved because the Giffords bulls eye graphic at her website exposed her to criticism -- justified or not -- and could not leave well enough alone.

She also has repeatedly raged against people who would violate her family's privacy while repeatedly using her husband and children as stage props, most dramatically in her short-lived reality TV show, which was another miscalculation because it further revealed her to be a phony.

This seems a little more than spur of the moment shoot your mouth off, though.

Notice that I'm not taking a position one way or the other on whether she did it, just wondering, if she did it--she's certainly capable of something so irrational and pointless--what the heck she hoped to prove.

Thank you for responding, Mr. Mullen. First of all, I think your essay is one of the best summaries of Babygate that I have come across, and I have read a lot of them! You covered the subject brilliantly. You will note that you have probably never heard of my book before now. That is because most of the Babygate bloggers suppressed it as much as possible.

There are two key differences between the other Babygate bloggers and me. I am quite possibly the only lifetime Democrat in the bunch and I have lived in the South and observed the effects of The Southern Strategy for decades. My book is about national economics and political history as much as it is about Babygate. I had been working on the project years before Sarah Palin entered the national consciousness. The basic intent of the book, as far as Palin goes, was to dare her to either come after me to force a denial of the story or to have the established media pick up the story. Neither of these things occurred, however, one contact I had, apparently a person close to the Palin inner circle, claimed that Palin was fully aware of the book and thankful that few were paying any attention to me.

The most shocking part of the story to me has been the research I have done after the book was released. I have accumulated countless pages of data on the leaders of the Babygate movement. What I have discovered is truly appalling. I have been keeping this material in case I want to publish it at some later date. I am not the only one aware of this material. There are a number of others, but they all deny any direct knowledge of it. The last word I have published concerning my most likely Babygate theory is here: http://floydmorr.blogspot.com/2012/05/diabolical-plan.html

Thank you for your interest, Mr. Mullen! Any further communication should probably be continued through my direct e-mail, ice9 at nctv.com. Thank you again!

Hi Shaun, many thanks for writing this post. It takes courage to write about this subject, as this is considered to be "birther" territory. In the end, you, Andrew Sullivan, Brad Scharlott and the others will be proven right, because Sarah Palin's "big secret" cannot be hidden forever.

This is an excellent summary. However, I personally don't agree with the claim that a "stand-in-baby" was used at the beginning, I don't think that this was the case.

To the commentator above who asked how the baby could have been Bristol's, as she also gave birth to Tripp in December 2008: The answer is rather simple, yet "hard to believe." Trig was not born on April 18, 2008, but much earlier. When exactly, has never been conclusively established, but December 2007/January 2008 would be the best guess. From February 2008 onwards, Bristol appeared in public again.

There would be many more things to say to this. "Babygate" is a highly complex issue, and the complexity has helped the Palins to conceal the truth. However, it was the unwillingness of the mainstream media to take this issue seriously in the first place which prevented an exposure of this scandal - with the media believing that it could backfire on the Democrats (or others).

For further reading, our most important posts about "Babygate" can be found at the right sidebar of our blog:

Like you, I remain interested in the hoax, but not because of Palin. I am interested because this hoax was surely known to McCain, Schmidt, and other top GOP folks. Those who did not know before the election surely knew after it, if they could read and chose to understand what happened.

What happened is a hoax meant to sway an election, taking advantage of a disabled child to do so, and a cover-up that persists to this day, abetted by the mainstream media. Scharlott quotes the late Christopher Hitchens as saying that the hoax and its sordid details was common knowledge to him and his top-tier journalist pals. Which implies that it must be the true decision-makers of our national media that have chosen to leave this hoax unreported.

Why? Because to report it would mean that lots of VIPs would have really unpleasant explaining to do. And it would reflect so badly on the GOP's "family values" that the hoax was supposed to symbolize, that it was all based on a lie. As we know it is anyway.

So, this remains a very important issue in terms of freedom of the press to report chicanery, even at the top levels of our wanna-be leaders.

(By the way, the "hasty return" from the talk in Texas, with the alleged amniotic fluid leak, was hasty only per Palin's own account. There is no other supporting evidence that calls were made, plane tickets were changed, or any haste whatsoever demonstrated. Ditto re the alleged phone calls with the MD in Alaska, who has corroborated nothing: we know about these phone calls only from Sarah Palin, a well-documented and chronic liar.)

Good for you to keep raising this issue. It is waaaaaay more important than Sarah Palin. I believe the photos prove she was not pregnant: there are too many photos that show her flat profile too close to the "birth" and immediately following or preceding other photos that show her with a watermelon-sized belly. You can put on a fake "empathy belly" at will, but you can't take off a real pregnancy and then have it intact a day later. I believe the proof is in the photos. Until more people decide to talk. Tick tock.

I have followed this hoax from the beginning and I'm very happy that you have done this terrific recap of it. Perhaps my comments will help you pursue it further.

-- Although the question of Trig's bio-parentage is interesting, as is Bristol's role, it is very easy to go far afield with various conjectures. Trig's bioparentage is irrelevant to the fact that PALIN WAS NOT PREGNANT WITH TRIG. That is the key fact re the hoax. All else is interesting red herrings in terms of unmasking the hoax, including the multiple babies issue. Her tubal ligation after Piper and before Trig, even, is not as relevant as the simple question: was she pregnant or not pregnant?

-- I was one of those who pressed McGinniss on his blog to come off the fence re his "trignosticism," and he made it clear at one point that he was sure there was a hoax but if he said so his book would be marginalized as being written by a crazy person. As it turns out, his book had enough well-documented negative info about Palin to be marginalized anyway.

-- There is a rumor that there was a comprehensive story about the hoax ready to go to press at the ADN just before the election, but it was pulled by management at the last minute. If true, there is surely a copy of it around somewhere. More interesting than its contents are the lines of force that kept it from being published.

-- The "Gusty photos" (showing Palin in watermelon-sized-belly mode) appeared on the web only in August. Could they have been taken then (in Aug 2008) rather than before Trig's birth? a video appeared after the election saying no, the Gusty photos were taken when the legislature finished the budget on a "Live at 5" broadcast. However, the alleged 5 o'clock taping shows a dark glass panel in the door behind Palin, her styling is more like that done by the RNC than her own efforts (hair combed, down, no scarf, giant belly, thinner face). The video serving as "proof" of the date of the photos has multiple splices in it and should be inspected closely.

-- The medical letter has so many more oddities than you list, notably the MD's signature in two colors of ink, suggesting sloppy Photoshopping.

With your near-Pulitzer background, I wish you would go for it: solve this hoax and win the prize. But even more important, bring the real facts of the 2008 election to the fore.

The claim that the "Gusty-pictures" which were taken on April 13, 2008 could be photoshopped was intensively investigated by the "Trig Truthers" in 2008/2009 and proved to be a dead end. No real evidence could be found that these photos were manipulated, and Andrea Gusty herself published a forceful rebuttal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzyZkl4GyrM

It is true however that these pictures were published on flickr on August 31, 2008 in an obvious attempt to silence the "fake pregnancy rumours" - and this attempt was successful, as these photos were immediately used to discredit the "doubters." This is the real significance of these photos, I wrote a recap of this issue for example here:

These pictures were even used by a website like "factcheck.org" (as well as Huffington Post) as absolute proof that the pregnancy was not faked. That fact that somebody who fakes a pregnancy needs to look pregnant at some point (in order to be convincing) was simply ignored.

Crucially however, just 18 days before, on March 26, 2008, Sarah Palin's belly was flat.

On April 13, 2008, Sarah Palin wore in fact a pregnancy belly, but this "claim" seems to be so unbelievable and outrageous (from the perspective of a "sane person") that it is virtually impossible to believe. It's the "big lie" that Sarah Palin got away with: We ourselves would never do anything like that - and this is why Sarah Palin got away with it, in combination with the well-documented reluctance in the media to touch the subject...

So here we are now, five years later, the truth is still in plain sight, and yet, nobody can openly talk about it.

Finally: When I had an email exchange with a well know liberal journalist in April 2013, this person told me that "everyone" that this person knows is well aware that Palin faked her pregnancy. Apart from Sarah Palin being a fraud, the other scandal is the fact that the media rejected to expose her, despite the fact that they know the truth.

Many thanks again, Shaun, it is so rare that anyone dares to touch this issue (apart from Andrew Sullivan). Any journalist seriously investigating the topic would quickly find out that there is no doubt that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy. I myself for example talked to several Republican politicians in Alaska on the phone in 2009 (for example Lyda Green and Randy Ruedrich), and they are all well aware that Sarah Palin's pregancy wasn't "real." Lyda Green for example herself saw Sarah Palin when she made the pregnancy announcement on March 5, 2008, and saw her again later, and Lyda said to me that Palin did not look pregnant at all (however, she also made it clear that she doesn't know the "truth" about the pregnancy).

I am just feeling bad about the fact that for example Andrew Sullivan's reputation has been damaged due to his courage on this topic, and Joe McGinniss had to suffer as well, and it really is about time to finally reveal the truth.

I do take mild exception to one thing you wrote: Not only do I not believe that Andrew's reputation was damaged in the long run, when and if the smoking gun is found or someone credible with ties to the Palin family confirms the false pregnancy, it will be noted that people like Andrew -- and you and I and a small handful of others -- refused to let the story die.

Hi Shaun, yes, my remark regarding Andrew Sullivan was not properly worded. What I meant was that at this moment in time, Andrew has to live with the fact that quite a number of people feel free to label him a "conspiracy theorist", and this is one of the milder terms. Right now, I am pretty sure that Andrew feels that this is a very unpleasant situation.

Joe McGinniss, who wrote about the pregnancy hoax in his book "The Rogue" and there made it absolutely clear that he had not much faith in Sarah Palin's reassurances that nothing was wrong with her pregnancy, was in a similar situation. It's very tragic that he has already passed away.

Yes, in the end, the handful of people who didn't let the story die will be the winners. I just hope that it won't take decades for the truth to be revealed to the public.

One, Palin's return flight home was not "hastily changed" after the "contractions" started. Palin took her ORIGINAL flight, the details of which are public record. There was no last minute changes made by Todd as Palin wrote in her book; they never intended to stay for the black tie ball that night in Texas. Why? Because one cannot camouflage a non-pregnant silhouette in a formal ball gown. They flew home on the originally booked flights.

Secondly, Catherine Baldwin Johnson DID indeed utter a lone but pivotal statement regarding Trig's maternity- after being met with multiple "no comment" answers in regard to Palin's pregnancy, a frustrated editor in chief of the anchorage daily news exasperatedly demanded "can you please just confirm the child we know as Trig Palin was born to governor Sarah Palin on April 18 of 2008?"

I take this to mean she literally was not able to confirm the details.

There is a simple reason for her inability to confirm Palin's narrative- Baldwin Johnson was not at Mat Su Regional Medical Center on 4/18/08. She was not even in the same town. She was at another hospital, her presence logged in with her key card.

The "I cannot confirm" was, at some point, on the anchorage daily news site, linking to a video of CBJ looking nervous and resentful, with her attorney hovering about six feet behind her. I'm sorry I don't have the time to run it down today but I'll go digging for it tomorrow.

As for the other issue...no, I cannot provide the details you would like. I'm sure you are smart enough to figure out why. I truly want nothing more than to shout it from the rooftops- CBJ wasn't at mat su; I know this because she was working a shift WITH ME!

However, I'm perilously close to HIPAA grey areas...and in this economy, I need to keep my very good job which provides the sole support for my family and the benefits which care for my disabled child. (Whom I actually did give birth to without benefit of pre-labor air travel.)

I really keep hoping if I leave the bread crumbs, someone with less to lose than myself with follow them to the door and kick it down.

I notice there is another poster on IM who also is saying CBJ wasn't there. I'm hoping the two of us are but the beginning in a line of swiftly falling dominoes, the last one of which will be Palin herself, tipping over into oblivion.

I want to comment further on the issue of how such hoax could possibly go forward, without someone going public to denounce it as a lie.

A good comparison to make, is the case of fake memoirs. Several high profile memoirs have been found to be fakes, which flourished in the public eye for some years, despite the fact that many people knew of the true identity of the authors. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments, a supposed Holocaust memoir which received several prestige awards, is one example. Mischa Defonseca, Survival with Wolves, which flourished for years despite the doubts of a small minority, is also worth considering.

Casting doubt upon a personal story seems cranky and illmannered. People like Wilkomirski and Sarah Palin know how to take advantage of this, and portray themselves as brave and truthful. They are anything but.

Also, since people reference certain times of the year, please recall the now public emails from Dec 30th 2007 where Sarah tells close staffers that her family will be at their cabin enjoying her oldest son's last few days in Alaska. That and the whole family was in Juneau in mid December 2007. You'd think that if they were trying to hide a pregnancy, the person in question wouldn't be SO public. AND in school.

so the claim is that the first baby was born to sarah April 18, and the second baby was born to bristol December 28. bristol could have had the first baby on April 18th (or a few days earlier) after hiding a pregnancy from her family and thinking she wasn't as far along as she really was (explaining why sarah would have claimed to not be as far along). she could have gotten pregnant again immediately after (seriously, i know people with kids that are 9-10 months apart) and then either induced labor early to keep up the charade, just gone into labor early, or pretended that the baby was born slightly earlier than it was. if she got pregnant right away, the baby would have been due in Jan so late december wouldn't be ridiculously early. it seems much more likely that the first baby was the product of her husband having an affair and that his birth mom didn't want to keep him once she found out he had downs, though. to me, it seems very unlikely that sarah was pregnant based partially on photos but primarily on her behavior leading up to his birth.

There are two things that bother me about this hoax. Before Trig's 'birth' Sarah had been pregnant six times, but had two miscarriages. If she was really pregnant with a special needs child and started having problems a month or two before the delivery date she would have started worrying about a third miscarriage, not just assuming everything would miraculously work out fine. Would you want to have a miscarriage on an airplane?

Another thing you have to take into consideration is the fact that you can't fix a timeline based on Trig's and Tripp's reported birthdays. Either one or both of them could be wrong by months. It's entirely possible that Bristol gave birth to both babies, especially if one was premature. Bristol, or whoever the birth mother is, could have given birth somewhere else to a premature baby that stayed in intensive care in another hospital for a month or two before it was well enough for Sarah to 'deliver' it at Matsu.

Just because Sarah's parents showed a reporter a baby doesn't prove who the baby was, when it was born, where it was born, or who gave birth to it. I know when I saw the pictures from the hospital I didn't believe that baby was a newborn full-term infant, much less one that was almost 2 months premature. And then carting this delicate little angel all over when he was barely a week old? Really? A premature Down's syndrome baby with a hole in his heart? Really?

You are all missing the whole deception. Hollywood is involved in a great deception. If they hated her so much, they wouldn't allow her the time of day. This deception involves who is what. In Hollywood, no one is who they are. If Palin was an outsider, she'd never been considered airtime. She never gave birth to any children. She's transgender. This is such a deception. She's a boy. Todd love's his chick with a dick.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.